Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

“You took quite a long time to answer the door.”

“I was busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Sleeping.”

“You sleep with the light on? I saw the light on.”

“I was getting ready to go to sleep.”

“Are you with someone?”

“No.”

“I didn’t have to knock, you know. I was just being polite.”

“What do you want?”

She cannot stop him now, though she tries. He leans into the door and it gives way. Her strength is a child’s compared to his.

“You haven’t heard from him?”

“Who?”

“Lewis? Who else?”

“No, of course not.”

The door clicks closed. “What’s behind your back?”

She almost says nothing, but she knows that will only make him angry, will make him step toward her, grip her arm and twist it into view. Slowly she reveals the scissors.

“There’s hair on these scissors.”

“I was cutting my hair.”

“That’s not your hair. It’s not the same color.”

“Then I was trimming the clots off a stuffed ground sloth.”

“I thought you said you were getting ready for bed?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Do I? I have so many for you.”

He snatches the scissors from her. His fingers, too fat, don’t fit into the grips, so he must use two hands when he opens and closes them. “Hold still a moment.” He steps close to her and she slides back her feet and he says, “I said hold still.” She does as he says but will not allow him to observe her fear. She crosses her arms and stares straight ahead when he circles her, teasing the blades across her shoulders, the back of her neck, down her arms. Finally he chooses a section of sleeve, a moth’s wing of fabric, that he snips away, and it disappears into his pocket.

She prides herself on her strength. Not just the muscles that ball in her arms, but her heart, her ability to bully back anyone who might take advantage of her. But she feels weak now. Slade makes her feel weak. She almost cries out for the boy. That will only make the situation worse, she knows, give Slade another target to prod with a blade, another line of questioning to delay his stay and renew his suspicion of her. But the scissors are so sharp and his mouth is so close, his breath mingling with hers.

She is close to kicking at his crotch, when just in time Slade drops the scissors. They clatter on the floor. He walks away. He opens the door and pauses at the threshold to regard her. “I could hurt you, you know. And nobody would stop me.”

She has to swallow several times before she can say, “I know.”

“Good.” He pulls the door behind him, his eye in the crack the last thing she sees of him.

* * *

Ella won’t speak to Simon, not at first. He asks her what happened. He asks her what’s the matter. He asks how can he help. She paces the hallway and then their room, stomping her feet, brushing a hand through her hair, slashing the air with the scissors.

“What?” Simon says, and after a few minutes she starts to talk under her breath and Simon says, “I can’t hear you,” and her voice grows louder and louder and comes out finally as a shout when she goes over all the things she should have said and done but didn’t.

He waits for her to finish and then says, “I hate him too.”

This seems to irritate her. As if hatred were water and there was only so much to go around. “You hate him? Why would you hate him? What do you even care? What does this have to do with you?”

When he says Slade killed his father, she tucks the scissors into her belt and says, “Oh.”

“I’ll kill him for you. I’ll kill him for both of us.”

“For me?” At first she seems taken by the idea. That he would offer such a thing. Then she is struck more by the absurdity than by the nobility of the gesture. “You can’t even climb a ladder without breaking your arm. You can’t even tie your own shoe. You’ll kill him? I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him my own damn self.”

He sees there is no reasoning with or comforting her, so he tries a method of thieving: distraction and inertia. If you sneak up beside somebody and hold a rotten apple to their face, ask them to buy it, they’ll naturally reel back, swing up their hands. With that momentum he’ll pop off a bracelet or slide coins from a pocket. He’ll follow Ella’s lead. “How would you do it? You could stab him. Sneak up behind him and—” Here he slashes at an invisible figure and makes a wet, shredding sound.

“No,” she says and wrinkles her face. “That wouldn’t work. That wouldn’t work at all. You’d have to get close and risk him grabbing hold of you. And he’s too big. You’d have to stab him a million times. And you’d have to stab him with something long, like a sword, to even reach anything important.”

“Then, what? How would you kill him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’d push something out a window onto him. Something heavy. An anvil. Knock his brains out.”

“Or poison!”

“That wouldn’t work either. Same as with the knife. He’s too big. How much poison would it take to kill someone like that? A lot. And how do you camouflage a lot of poison? You can’t just sprinkle it on a biscuit. You see? You need me. You can’t think anything through on your own.”

Her tone has mellowed. Her mouth has risen into a smile. He has helped lag her fear. Not enough to get her to sleep, but enough to get her ready for it. They share the same room, their beds separated by a night table. They extinguish their lamps and he lies there for a long time, listening to her breath, waiting for it to settle into the rhythm of sleep. Then she says, “Simon?”

“What?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“You know.” He waits for her to say more, but she doesn’t. Outside the turbines turn and croak their lazy circles and sink them into sleep.

The next morning, it takes him a moment to shake off his dreams, to orient himself in the museum, to recognize Ella spreading the curtains and letting in a slash of sunlight.

He sees then his backpack, stained and patched, made mostly from canvas and bottomed with leather. He has asked for it many times — so many times that she has threatened to throw it away if he asks again — and now here it is. The flap is open, as if it has disgorged all its contents on the floor. There is a blister pack of stainless steel nails, a chisel, a hammer, a faded rubber ducky with the beak hanging off, a rusted coil of wire, three sheets of sandpaper, a corroded butcher knife and metal spatula, three bottles of aspirin and another for springtime allergies.

She sits on the edge of the bed and folds her hands in her lap and asks if he sells these things and he says yes, and she asks if people wonder where he finds them and he says not really. “Because I’m a thief, you know. You don’t want to ask too many questions when you’re buying from a thief.”

“You’re not a thief. You’re a grave robber.”

“No, no. I steal from the living too.” He tells her that he can pick any lock, climb any wall, slip through any door or window in the Sanctuary. This he says in a rush of pride and excitement — and then realizes whom he is speaking to and goes quiet and readies for a scolding.

But she only tucks her hair behind her ears, a delicate gesture for her, and says, “What about that one?”

She is talking about a photograph, discolored and bent in half, the picture flaking along the crease. A family on a sand dune. Two parents, three kids, all leaning into each other, their smiles bright and their hair windblown, while sunlight sparkles in a thousand crystalline points off the ocean behind them. “Why would you take this?”

“I don’t know.” He crawls out of bed and squats to study the photo. “I guess I like the way it makes me feel when I look at it and hold it in my hand. It’s like it’s got this charge, a little life in it still.” The mother appears to be laughing. One of the children, a boy, isn’t looking at the camera at all, his eyes on a gull riding the breeze. Simon imagines the bones beneath their faces and wonders where they might be interred. “This whole museum is a bit like that, don’t you think?”